My issue is related to UEFN project ownership validation, not extracting files from a published island. I am the original creator of the project and I am requesting assistance to verify ownership and restore access under the correct Epic account.
Since this requires Epic staff review, I would greatly appreciate if a member of the Epic UEFN team could look into this case.
What @Astrotronic is trying to say is that if you Bake a cake, you can’t get the individual ingredients back…
The island you published is that Baked version of the cake, and even while still being you who made it, you can’t revert it back to its ingredients (aka your project files).
A published project and its source files are different things. The stored published project is not on same format used by the editor, it is a highly optimized and “cooked” version of your project for all platforms supported by Fortnite. In general, this is an irreversible process.
If you want to keep backups of your source project, you must use the Revision Control to store snapshots of your project over time, so if you want to recover it later, go back into past versions, switch devices and so on, you still have the source files backed up in case is needed…
You can make a local copy of your project (ex. storing on a backup flash drive), or use UEFN built-in URC for cloud-backups provided by epic. But if you did not made backups on the past, sadly you will not be able to fully recover it.
There is actually some data-recovery steps possible by reverse engineering but is very limited and basically only works for some minimal project stuff (such as verse files), also not being an officialy supported method plus being hard to teach…
Thank you for the clarification and detailed explanation.
I understand now that the published island is a cooked/optimized version and not the original project files used in UEFN. However, I am the original creator and owner of the island and the Epic account that published it.
I would like to kindly ask if there is any possible internal method, tool, or limited recovery process that Epic or the developer team might have access to — even if it can only recover partial data such as devices setup, map layout, or verse files.
I fully understand this may not be officially supported, but if there is even a small chance or experimental method that could help retrieve any part of the project structure, I would greatly appreciate guidance.
This island represents a significant amount of work, and I am willing to follow any advanced steps or provide any information required from my side.
I think that will only be answered by opening a ticket through the Epic Games Creator Support, sorry :/
The forums are more for public bug reports, feedback or community help, not very good for internal communication and support with epic internal systems and these things, we can’t do much about…
But I am pretty sure that in your case it is complicated and probably they would not be able to do much since “is not epic fault”, you can try but if you will succeed or not will depend a lot on how much epic can interfere on your personal problem.
URC2 makes some auto backups in some cases even without user explicitly backing it up, if the project was connected to URC2 this may be worth checking… (But still not guaranteed to work)